Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘tone-on-tone’

This manicure was SO straight-forward that…I kinda forgot to take photos of it. 80% of the photos that I have are oddly out of focus and 15% are badly framed. Oops! At least it is a simple one I suppose!

Super simple and super tiny nails today! After the Christmas holidays my nails broke down to tiny nubbins. Which means I was too lazy to do any real nail art on them, and just went ahead and stamped! And for some reason I was in a tone-on-tone mood (I think I wore these at the same time as Monday’s nails). Voila!

So, not the most exciting manicure in the world, but cute enough! Hope you enjoyed. I remain incredibly jet lagged but quite happy (well, not to be back in the hospital, but certainly to be sleeping in my own bed)!

Super simple and super fast. This is one of the quasi-Christmas themed manicures I actually did over the holiday break. I more or less only took reds and greens with me, with a few stamping plates. I decided to do a tone-on-tone manicure using the wonderful opacity of every A England polish, and one of my favorite (if underused) dark green holos, Ski Lodge.

This whole manicure took less than an hour, and it was mostly waiting for Ski Lodge to dry before I could stamp. The design ended up being somewhat subtle, but since the nails were a vibrant shade of forest green, they were themselves far from subtle!

More blurple! Other than nude, purple/blurple/periwinkle is probably my most used color this year (I don’t know why). It is also easily my most-bought polish family this year!

This particular color combination was REALLY tone-on-tone, and yet worked well! The scrubs I have to wear when I am on ICU blocks and in the emergency department are a pastel periwinkle-grey…which sounds pretty but lets be honest scrubs do not look good on ANYONE (and I am no exception). That said, when my nails match my scrubs I feel a tad bit classier than I have any right to when wearing scrubs! Hence all the blurple and periwinkle nails (never fear, there are more coming in the next few weeks :-p).

Rose AND copper AND gold (oh my)! Between the nude and the shimmery metallic-tones of Frohe Feiertage I didn’t know what to call this mani at all. I love how the nail art looks, a bit tone-on-tone and a lot glittery, but naming it was a challenge!

If I’m being honest, there isn’t much to say about this manicure, other than ‘ooooh shiny’ because its mostly just a stamp over a sparkly base. Sometimes, however, that just works!

I should probably start writing down some of the tone-on-tone color combos that I like; it isn’t something that I would reach for if left to my own devices, but it works great in the hospital! However, it does fail pretty regularly (and then I have to restart my whole manicure, which is time-consuming).

I will never give up on nail art! Even if it becomes increasingly harder to manage due to time and responsibilities. Anyway. When I started residency I knew I needed nails that were subtle and pale pink and all that appropriate stuff, but also fancy and fun enough that I wouldn’t be disappointed in myself. Voila!

So yes, this is the nail art I had on for my first few days of residency. TECHNICALLY I think we are not supposed to have any type of design on our nails? But I don’t remember exactly the rules and its not like I’d ever paint something disrespectful so, we shall see. Hopefully no one gets angry about painted nails!

This is it, the final boring mani that I wore to interviews! Although if I am being honest, this one is not all that boring. It is also February which means I am permitted to start posting hearts (not that I have any other pink manis prepared…I spent the last few weeks wearing subtle pink and so I have been avoiding the color altogether. Can I make a blue Valentine’s mani???). Anyway, have some shimmer and some hearts!

I knew what I wanted to do with this mani, and trialled three different grey/grey combos before settling on this one. I am a little sad because the hearts take up so much space you can barely see the base! This only matters because the base is Crystal Crown, which I have just now realized was discontinued at some point in the past. This is awful because it is easily my most-used grey, and the bottle is half empty! Ooops. I need to keep a better eye on when indie polishes discontinue my favorites!

But anyway, this was basically advanced stamping with grey and white over grey. It looks rather nice for all that, and was suitably almost-subtle and heart-shaped!

Happy Friday! And this ends the run of boring manis. Now all I need to do is actually pick where I want to be next year (and for the next 10 or so years, yikes!) and get started on some actual Valentine’s manis!

Continuing with the theme of subtle, snowy, and swirled, we have this post! By this point in the interview season I was giving up on the very bland manis that I sported in the beginning, and was firmly in the realm of mints and golds and a bit more contrast.

That said, I still deemed this subtle enough to wear! It is another of my favorites, and it helped that during this particular interview it definitely snowed! It is always fun when my nail art predicts the weather :-p

I do need to get some more snowflake stamps, on the off chance that I have time to do nail art next winter (this whole residency thing is becoming far more real, I need to put together my actual list and cross my fingers!), since most of the plates I have don’t stamp well!

This mani was done super last minute because I had forgotten that I had an interview the next day (I never forget about flights, but if its only a bus ride away…well, that can be a problem). I mostly wanted something fast!

I don’t know that I love the combo of a frosty shimmer with a metallic polish, I think a creme stamp might have worked better. I do love this stamp though, it is pretty much my go-to when I need something fast, swirly, and pretty!

The colors here are Freshwater Pearl by ULTA for the pink base, and Penny Talk for the rose gold stamp. The stamp itself is from Bundle Monster plate 314.

Of course, there was also no sun while I wore this, so you only get to see indoor lighting, sorry!

I promise that the designs going up next week are a tad more colorful! Happy Friday!

I wanted to be ever-so-slightly daring with this particular mani, and used a pale grey/mint polish instead of pink or nude! It didn’t matter, no one commented on it during the interview :-p

This is probably one of my favorite designs among the work appropriate set that I’ve had to do these past few months. I really just love this base color, and I adore the tone-on-tone stamping with gold highlights. I think this is the third time I’ve done something with this color set (most of the rest were on clinical rotations around a year ago). Go figure!

I am curious, what do you guys think about more adventurous colors for work, but with tone-on-tone for the design? Like a darker grey or a brown shimmer rather than something pastel in the pink range? The ‘art’ would be subtle but I don’t know that it isn’t the color that matters more.

Remember how the day before Valentine’s Day I said I had this awesome new nude polish? And then I used that polish as my base for the Valentine’s Dotticure without showing you swatches? Well, here are the swatches!

This is three thin coats of Cherish by Picture Polish. Since I am stuck wearing boring colors in the hospital, I figured it was time to amass a collection of nudes and semi-nudes that are moderately interesting and do not require 23482934 coats to be opaque. This definitely fits the bill!

Cherish is a slightly grey nude with copious holo shards scattered in it. It is quite flattering! The holo certainly catches the light, but it isn’t strong enough to be distracting. It also dried quite nicely 🙂

I stamped over Cherish with Penny Talk by Essie, using a Born Pretty stamping plate. I cannot claim credit for this idea…my sister asked me to use this specific stamp on her nails a while back (hers were blue-on-blue) and I liked how it came out so I decided to use the pattern!

So what do you think, tone-on-tone but still pretty? The best part was that the pattern almost disappeared in indirect lighting, and jumped out in sunlight.

Yet another super simple mani! I actually did this while ON vacation, so it had to be fast! These are also iPhone photos (though luckily it was moderately sunny outside in Florida at the time so the pictures came out alright).

I started with a pinkish-red creme. Once that was dry, I just grabbed a bobby pin (they live in my purse) and made a series of dots with a color-coordinated metallic pink.

Left to my own devices I would not have grabbed these colors, but one of my friends doing her medical residency was with us and she wanted “work appropriate” colors (which apparently means pinks, reds, and nudes?). Unfortunately, she never sat down for long enough for me to paint her nails! But I was stuck with pinks anyway.

I’ve gotten more behind the concept of tone-on-tone designs, so when I got Zoya Veronica I knew I had to pair her up with my much-loved but under-used Zoya Blaze. And being me, I had to use striping tape to do it!

Veronica is one of the newish colors from Zoya’s fall release. She is a deep red-toned pink. Wonderfully self-leveling, opaque in two coats. A nice slightly more feminine alternative to red.

Blaze is almost exactly the same dark-pink-almost-red base as Veronica, but with awesome holographic glitter shards. In some lights it was hard to see the design, but when it came out it was BEAUTIFUL. Glittery pinkness!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! I have one more red/pink post (that compares all the three almost-identicle colors in one mani)…and quite a few more colors 😀

I love rhymey titles! Coral floral! I received these beautiful floral heart water decals from the Born Pretty Store and wanted to try them over tone-on-tone stamps (because these are the things I think about). It has been a while since I played with my coral polishes, and what better excuse than for the OMD Challenge coral day?

I have on two coats of a darker coral, stamped with light orange, and then I added my water decals. There are two types, a full circle (see the thumb) and a 3/4 circle (see my middle finger). Most of the ones on this mani are the 3/4 circle patterns that I cut up to place around my nail. These water decals were a delight to work with…thick enough to reposition (I replaced one of them 4 times without it wrinkling or ripping) but thin enough to disappear entirely under top coat.

Colors

Coral: Essie – Sunday Funday

Orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach

Stamp: BM – 314

I am really happy with how this mani came out! If you want your own cute heart-flower water decals, check out the Born Pretty Store. They are $2.86. Don’t forget to use my 10% off code, LY5X31!

Another entry into my Test All The Holographics mani lineup! Here we have Teal from Nabi. This is a beautiful bright teal linear holo, with medium holographic density.

This is a slightly greener-leaning teal than most of the ones I own, but it is really quite pretty (if you can ignore my lobster fingers). Two coats shown here.

I accented Teal with dots of Wet n’ Wild Caribbean Frost. My favorite part of this mani is how textured my 4th finger accent looks! It was actually almost smooth to the touch (I didn’t add top coat to preserve the holo quality), but looked variegated!

Sorry for the slight mess around my nails, I did these at the beach and had no acetone handy. Oops!